- Clayton Hauck
- Built to Spill at the 2009 Pitchork Music Festival
Like Mission of Burma’s The Sound, the Speed, the Light, the Feelies’ Here Before, and a good many records by Neil Young (who might well have invented this particular subgenre), the recently released new Built to Spill album, Untethered Moon, is the sort of guitar-driven rock record that feels like catching up with an old friend. The solos are satisfying both technically and emotionally, despite not breaking any new ground. Doug Martsch has no axe to grind here, nothing to prove. He’s long been able to play guitar as though speaking through it, and when he’s soloing he often speaks eloquently—his expansive sound has the effect of recasting his modest lyrics on a cosmic scale. This gift allows him, on Untethered Moon, to make surprisingly nourishing food for thought from such basic poetic ingredients as aging, immortality, and emotional pain.
I find this sort of ingenuousness lacking in most recent Hollywood blockbusters, which also aspire to create a sense of wonder. In Peter Jackson’s Hobbit series, Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, numerous DreamWorks animations, and nearly every Marvel Studios release I’ve seen, the filmmakers present the audience with special effects from the very first scene—effects that are both intricate and large-scale. There’s rarely any sense of intimacy to throw the spectacle into relief, and so nothing feels stumbled upon. Of all the movies to fall under the aforementioned categories, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy seemed to come closest to breaking the mold, delivering a fair amount of off-the-cuff character humor before devolving into the routine half-hour of large-scale destruction and/or aerial combat that critic Matt Zoller-Seitz has termed “things crashing into things.”
